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This paper presents theoretical and experimental results on bilateral teleoperation of multiple mobile slave agents coupled to a single master robot. We first design a passifying proportional-derivative (PD) controller to enforce motion tracking and formation control of master and slave vehicles under constant, bounded communication delays. Then, we incorporate avoidance functions to guarantee collision-free transit through obstructed spaces. The unified control framework is validated by experiments with two coaxial helicopters as slave agents and a haptic device as the master robot.

An approach is presented for realizing an order-of-magnitude improvement in spatial accuracy for voxel-based 6-DOF haptics. It trades constant-time performance for greater spatial accuracy. This helps to make 6-DOF haptics applicable to extraordinarily complex real-world task simulations, which often admit no other known solution short of physical mockup. A reduction of haptic fidelity is tactically incurred but simultaneously mitigated by augmenting standard voxel-sampling methodology with distance fields, temporal coherence, and culling of redundant polyhedral surface interactions. This is applied to large-scale haptic scenarios involving multiple moving objects and to collaborative virtual environments.

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